LAS VEGAS, Jan. 9, 2012 - International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2012 - OCZ Technology Group, Inc. (Nasdaq:OCZ), a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs), today announces the debut of new and exciting SSD solutions. Using the world's most popular technology tradeshow as a platform, OCZ's latest SSDs demonstrate a commitment to advancing flash storage technology into greater realms of performance and versatility, further driving adoption in client and enterprise applications.

"CES represents a great opportunity for us to showcase our latest storage technology, and highlight next generation cloud-optimized solid state solutions that address today's enterprise needs," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology. "Once again we have been able to leverage our increased R&D strength and our understanding of client needs to change the face of solid state storage and deliver innovative new solutions far ahead of our competitors, demonstrating technology leadership across all product categories."

OCZ will introduce next generation solutions designed to deliver higher performance, reliability, and storage capacity to meet the demands of the enterprise market with industry-leading products. OCZ products to be unveiled at CES include:

Z-Drive R5 – Utilizing the OCZ and Marvell co-developed Kilimanjaro platform, the fifth generation Z-Drive R5 is designed to accelerate "big data" like never before. As the world's first PCIe x16 Gen 3 SSD, which supports up to 16GB/s of total bandwidth, the R5 will be 2012's most advanced SSD, featuring performance that reaches up to an incredible 2.52 million IOPS and 7.2GB/s sequential transfers per card, with unlimited scalability and performance aggregation capability. With optional power fail protection the R5 will be available in a range of form factors including full height, half height, and 2.5-inch PCIe. The R5's industry-leading performance and storage capacities make pure flash storage in mission-critical applications possible.

Indilinx Everest 2 – The SATA 3.0-based third generation Indilinx controller is designed specifically for I/O-intensive workloads in a wide range of applications, supporting sequential speeds of up to 550MB/s, and up to 105,000 random read and 90,000 Random Write IOPS with the newest 2xnm flash technology. The Everest 2 platform supports up to 2TB capacity in a compact 2.5-inch form factor.

Z-Drive R4 CloudServ RM1616 – Making 16TB of storage on a single PCIe card a reality, the new Z-Drive R4 CloudServ RM1616 is the newest addition to the award-winning R4 Series. With performance of up to 6.5GB/s and over 1.4 million IOPS, the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ's level of concentrated performance and capacity enables system architects to design more productive infrastructures while lowering operating costs associated with hard drive technology.

Chiron 4TB SSD – The world's fastest and highest capacity SATA SSD for the enterprise, the Chiron Series provides a staggering 4TB in a compact 3.5-inch form factor. With performance exceeding SATA 3.0 bus capabilities, Chiron delivers speeds above 560MB/s and 100,000 IOPS. Eliminating the need for high capacity HDDs as anything other than backup devices, the Chiron Series enables mass SSD storage and is capable of deploying up to 96TB of storage in a 4U rackmount server chassis.

OCZ's enterprise showcase demonstrations will include, among others, an IBM System x3650 M3 highlighting the performance potential of the new Z-Drive R5 PCIe Gen 3 in a Linux server environment, as well as a HP ProLiant DL370 G6 server equipped with two Z-Drive R4 RM1616s delivering 1,400,000 IOPS per card with Windows Server 2008. In addition, drives based on the next-generation Indilinx Everest 2 platform will be demonstrated, as well as a prototype of "Lightfoot," an external Intel Thunderbolt SSD unveiling a new generation of high-performance portable storage.

The ASUS Transformer and the newer Transformer Prime are often considered the best Android tablets on the market and the most likely to be able to compete with Apple and its iPad in 2012. Our own review from Matt Smith tells the same kind of story and is definitely worth a read to get some context for this news today.

At CES 2012 ASUS is unveiling a new version of the Transformer Prime with the TF700T suffix that adds a couple of really nice features including a high-resolution 1920x1200 screen and a new 2.0 MP front camera for HD video conferencing. These replace a 1280x800 resolution screen and a 1.3 MP front camera.

The current Transformer Prime that might already be outdated...

Also worth noting is a change to the back plate on the device that ASUS claims "should enhance WiFi, BT and GPS performance." Some users had complaints about WiFi issues and this should address it, if you are willing to pay the higher price for the better hardware as well.

Expect to see this selling for $599 to $699 when it is available this quarter.

ASUS is hitting on all cylinders today and is announcing the new 7-in tablet called the Eee Pad MeMO ME370T. The company claims the device has "an emphasis on entertainment, media and light productivity" and with an IPS display and both capacitive and included-stylus touchscreen, the MeMO is a very unique product in the US market.

The hardware of the MeMO includes a 1280x800 resolution, dual-core Qualcomm 8260 1.2 GHz processor and 1GB of memory. I am kind of intrigued that they didn't use any currently available NVIDIA Tegra SoC on this though I won't speculate on why just yet.

It will be available in both 16GB and 32GB storage capacities and has 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1 and dual cameras for the front and back of the device; 1.2 MP front, 5.0 MP back. The unit will have a micro USB port, an audio jack that can be used for either output or input, Micro-SD memory card slot and micro-HDMI as well. Apparently a SIM card slot is included as well though I am not sure how that will work in the US market.

Coming in at under 1 pound, the MeMO is very light.

The Eee Pad MeMO will ship with Android 4.01 aka Ice Cream Sandwich when it is available in Q2 of 2012.

While tablets are so CES 2011, that does not stop that segment of consumer products from having a large showing at CES this year. You might consider them be a year too slate to the party, but that would have too many layers of pun-laden irony. One Laptop per Child Association (OLPCA) and OLPC Foundation (OLPCF) are non-profit organizations responsible for the popular One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. OLPC is responsible for highly affordable laptops aimed at the education of youth with a particular focus on developing countries. OLPC’s XO-3 is the project’s latest announced product and their attempt at an educational tablet.

Just a touch of Sugar…

Photo Credit: The Verge

Joanna Stern from The Verge conducted an interview with Ed McNierney, CTO of OLPC, to examine the product. While the specific system internals is not precisely known apart from their use of an ARM-based processor backed with 512MB of RAM and 4GB of permanent storage, there are two noteworthy comments regarding their ports. Firstly, while the power adapter is apparently a custom design, it is done in such a way that permits voltages between 10 and 25 volts; specifically, the OLPC is very apathetic when it comes to the purity of the inbound power and can even be charged by OLPC’s hand-crank generator. The other point-of-note for the XO-3 regards its audio jack: it is designed to be extensible to various non-auditory input devices such as a thermometer. This is not a tablet that you should be expecting under your tree both because it is not your typical consumer tablet as well as it not having a set release date -- and why do you still have gifts under your tree in January anyway? When the tablet does launch, it is expected to come along with a price-tag below $100.

Earlier in the weekend we heard about Lenovo's new ThinkPad X1 Hybrid notebook that combines standard Intel x86 hardware with a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor running an open-source Linux OS. While you will not be able to run both pieces of hardware at the same time the Media Mode allows you to put the Windows OS and hardware to sleep and run the light-weight OS with about double the battery life.

Lenovo was on hand at CES Unveiled to give us a walk through of how the feature really works. Take a look!

OCZ has a monster of a Z-Drive R4 on display at Storage Visions. We looked at the original 1.6TB R4 back in September. That one had 8 SF-2200 controllers on-board. This new R4 has 16!

This R4 has a beast of a VCA 2.0 controller. It's cooled by heat pipes, can handle up to 16 SATA links, address up to 16TB of storage, and pass up to 1.4 million IOPS across a PCIe bus at 6.5GB/sec (yes, GigaBytes). Note: this is not the R5, it's just a *really* fast R4.

OCZ is taking the lid off of even more SSD products at CES 2012 and we have another pretty impressive piece of hardware called the Chiron to show. Basically a follow up to the OCZ Colossus drive we reviewed back in November of 2009, the Chiron claims to be the fastest and highest capacity SATA-based SSD.

The Chiron will be available in capacities of up to 4TB and will fit in the standard 3.5-in form factor of traditional hard drives. This would enable users to finally use SSDs for their mass storage though prices will likely be the limiting factor for some time to come. Server OEMs will be able to deploy up to 96TB of SSD-based storage in a standard 4U rackmount server.

Based on OCZ's upcoming Indilinx Everest II controller, the Chiron will have transfer rates as high as 560 MB/s and over 100,000 4k IOPS.

Today at Storage Visions we saw OCZ displaying their new aeonDrive. This is a pure RAM based SSD meant for high end database applications where thousands of random writes per second take place continuously.

This is a multiple layer PCB, with extra connections that appear to allow even more to be stacked together. The unit pictured is only 32GB capacity, but considering it's all RAM, that's quite a bit.

While the RAM is DDR3-1333 from Micron, we figure it's running at a lower clock rate, since all of that data passes through a single SATA 6Gb/sec interface. OCZ claims up to 140,000 4K IOPS and >500,000 single sector (512 byte) IOPS. Those figures are essentially saturating the capabilities of SATA 6Gb/sec.

Today at the Storage Visions conference before the start of CES 2012, OCZ was on hand to show off a few new items they have planned for the year. First up is the Lightfoot, a successor to the OCZ Enyo external USB 3.0 SSD that we reviewed and really enjoyed our time with.

As you can see it looks quite a bit bigger than the original Enyo and that is on account of the increased storage capacity. You can expect to see sizes as high as 1TB and it will also be available in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB.

Here is the Thunderbolt connector that many a Mac user and, hopefully soon, PC users will be able to take advantage of for improved throughput with transfer rates as high as 750 MB/s quoted by OCZ.

OCZ claims that the one of the benefits of moving to the Thunderbolt interconnect is improved latency and highly accurate time synchronization that will allow for professional audio and video work to be done directly on the drive. We are pretty eager to see if this is the case...

The time frame for this device is still unknown but we'll see if we can get more information this week by asking the right people.

UPDATE: OCZ is telling us that Lightfoot will cost about $2/GB, so that 1TB model will run around $2000. For those a bit more frugal, you can get the 128GB option for something like $250.